Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Lew Terry (Property Manager): Some farmer in bib overalls shows up, ringing the buzzer, and rolling me out of bed in the middle of the day. Daytimers haven't any respect. He won't leave my stoop, and he's waving an envelope with this building as the return address, claiming to be the Casey kid's father. The father guy comes here all the way from nowhere to collect his kid's stuff.

Of course I gave him my sympathy. The police have already combed the apartment, but they didn't say I couldn't let in relatives. Funny thing is, the layout of this building isn't overly logical. To find the kid's unit, you need to go all the way to the back of the first-floor hallway, take the fire stairs up to the second floor, then walk along an open-porch deal to the end door. I don't tell the father guy this, but when I duck back inside my unit to get the pass key, the guy's disappeared.

One, two, three, the father guy's found his way to the kid's door and gone inside. His boots tracking cow shit all over my floors without a single misstep. Like he's lived here, but I swear he's never set foot on the premises. To open the apartment door, he shows me, you lift the knob and the hinges give, the screws wiggle, so you can trip the latch.

Me standing there with the pass key in my hand, he waves me inside.

But somebody's already beat us there.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): The coldest folks you'll ever meet. Them's the Caseys. Raised an only son who run off and got himself killed, probably just to pain his old man. Then Chet Casey stood on his own front porch and took the bad news like I was a radio giving the weather report. No emotion on that man's face. None whatsoever. All I can figure is, with a loco kid like Rant Casey, his folks gived him up for dead a long, long time before.

Lew Terry: The father guy's with me in the apartment, but you can hear somebody banging around in the bathroom. A burglar. These sneak thieves, they see an obit in the paper, or they see an article about how somebody snuffed it, and these lowlifes bust in to steal the stereo, the television, the prescription drugs. Seeing how our burglar's in the toilet, it's got to be some junkie ransacking the medicine cabinet.

Meanwhile, the dead kid's father, he doesn't look too concerned. He doesn't look too sad, neither. He's running the palm of one hand over one wall, feeling the paint with the flat of his hand.

The bathroom door busts open, and a girl steps out. One of her arms, it's not right, shriveled up, but in her other hand she holds the top of a black plastic garbage bag. She looks at me and the kid's father and says, "Who the fuck are you?"

And this hayseed smiles. Grinning like an ape, he steps away from feeling the walls and says, "Echo…" He says, "It's darned sweet to see you again."

Irene Casey: The morning I drove Chet up to the airport in Peco Junction, on his way to collect Buddy from the city, Chet told me the oddest bit of news. He reminded me about the brown cowboy wallpaper we hung in Buddy's room. He said to pull it down. Steam it soft, and tear it down, he said.

Stuck in the wall, behind every wad of booger that boy pasted there, Chet told me to dig in the plaster drywall. If I did that, he said, I'd never need for money another day in my life. Only, touching the boogers, he told me to wear rubber gloves.

Lew Terry: So this girl with the curled-up arm and the garbage bag, she looks at the father guy and says, "Have we met?"

And Farmer John, he nods at the black plastic bag she's holding and says, "What'd you find worth busting in for?"

"Rant gave me a key," the girl says.

And the father guy says, "I'm sorry. I reckon I forgot."

To me, the girl says, "You know what a ‘Porn Buddy' is?" She says that if somebody dies, most times they have a close friend who's designated to hurry over and search their place for drugs and sex stuff. All the junk they don't want their parents to know about them. She swings the black plastic bag in her hand and says, "Everything you don't want to know about your son is inside here."

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): We were, all of us, worried about Echo. On my own, I went to visit her. I took her a deli carton of chicken soup one night. I wanted to make sure she was eating. We sat and talked, and I didn't leave until she'd eaten every bite.

Just to tie up any loose ends, I'd loaded that soup with those Plan B birth-control pills. To really flush her out, I mean beyond loaded.

Lew Terry: The kid's father has gone back to feeling the walls, touching the soft black lumps that, close as I could guess, were hashish. Still touching the wall, not even looking at this girl with her bag, the father guy says, "Two secondhand skin magazines, some Percocet left over from his one visit to the dentist, a stained vibrator, and a pair of handcuffs lined with fake fur."

The girl looks inside the bag.